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[R-pkg-devel] Maintainer a Group

11 messages · Max Turgeon, John Muschelli, Duncan Murdoch +3 more

Original
John Muschelli
# 
Dear Package Devs,
Does anyone have any thoughts on whether a maintainer can be an
organization/group instead of a person for CRAN?  I don't see there being
an issue as long as the "maintainer" is responsive and fixes issues.  Just
figured I'd ask before trying this for some packages.

Best,
John
Max Turgeon
# 
Hi John,

"Writing R Extensions" is quite explicit about this:

For a CRAN package it should be a person, not a mailing list and not a corporate entity

Best,
Max
On Jun 25, 2019 3:45 PM, John Muschelli <muschellij2 at gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Package Devs,
Does anyone have any thoughts on whether a maintainer can be an
organization/group instead of a person for CRAN?  I don't see there being
an issue as long as the "maintainer" is responsive and fixes issues.  Just
figured I'd ask before trying this for some packages.

Best,
John


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John Muschelli
# 
So a single email is not a mailing list and it's a research group, so not
really a corporate entity.  I don't see WHY explicitly this isn't allowed.
I understand that this decision has been made with a lot of thought in
mind, though.  This would make it much easier for research groups to not
orphan packages because the maintainer/student leaves and we can't really
centralize our code bases.

Best,
John


On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 5:48 PM Max Turgeon <Max.Turgeon at umanitoba.ca>
wrote:

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Uwe Ligges
    

    

      
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The CRAN team has very bad experiences in the past when various people 
of research groups reponded with non coordinated answers. Hence the 
decision was made that we only want to talk to a dedicated maintainer 
who is responsible for the submission. And we want to know who that is.

Best,
Uwe Ligges

        
On 25.06.2019 23:52, John Muschelli wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      John Muschelli
    

    

      
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Understood, thanks for the clarification.  Is it acceptable to have gmail
tagged emails such as muschellij2+fslr at gmail.com for different packages
(such as fslr)?

Best,
John


On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 5:59 PM Uwe Ligges <ligges at statistik.tu-dortmund.de>
wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

            

      
      
      
    

        

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Uwe Ligges
    

    

      
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Yes, it is.

Best,
Uwe Ligges

        
On 26.06.2019 00:00, John Muschelli wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Duncan Murdoch
    

    

      
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On 25/06/2019 5:52 p.m., John Muschelli wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        
Pick one member of the group to be the maintainer. Don't choose someone 
who is likely to leave, choose a responsible person who is likely to be 
around a long time. If that person does leave, being responsible, 
they'll pass the role to someone else in the group.  If they don't, 
another member of the group can volunteer to CRAN to take over as 
maintainer after the package is orphaned because the original maintainer 
is not responding to CRAN requests.

On the other hand, if you were allowed to choose the group email as 
maintainer, requests from CRAN could be ignored, because everyone might 
assume it's someone else's responsibility to respond.

Duncan Murdoch

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      John Muschelli
    

    

      
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Duncan, I agree, but most likely to stay around is the PI, as much of the
work is students and post docs, who?s least likely to respond.   Even with
a responsible person, not easy for them to pass on as it?s not their job or
any easy thing to ask if it wasn?t the PI.  Also making a post doc or
student as the lead for multiple packages wouldn?t be appropriate or solve
the issue.  The group email would have a priority Of the ?true? maintainer
plus other helpers.  Just figured we?d get the confirmation before moving
forward.

On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 6:15 PM Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>
wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

  
    

      
      
    

  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Dario Strbenac
    

    

      
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Good day,

What about the CRAN package Rmixmod? Its contact address is a mailing list and its status is Orphaned. It seems that the mailing list e-mail address was not detected during review of the recently updated version. I hope that this can systematically be prevented in other package submissions.

--------------------------------------
Dario Strbenac
University of Sydney
Camperdown NSW 2050
Australia

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Uwe Ligges
    

    

      
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Thanks, a good example for the case at hand, where it again does not 
help that there is a mailing list, but apparently nobody feels 
responsible and the CRAN team had to fix the package twice already.

Best,
Uwe Ligges

        
On 26.06.2019 03:00, Dario Strbenac wrote:

            

      
      
      
    

        

      
      
    

  
  


  


      

    

    

      
      

        


  

        

      Joris Meys
    

    

      
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FWIW, at our department I'm the designated "maintainer" for most of the
packages developed here. While I worked on quite a few of them, I'm not
involved in all. We chose to do it this way exactly for the reasons
mentioned in this thread, and out of respect for the wishes of CRAN. I'm
not a researcher myself but officially "technical staff" (i.e. I have a
fixed position at the uni and I'm not a professor). That makes me the
"natural" responsible for following up on our packages.

That said, people leaving the research department shouldn't be that much of
a problem, as long as there's some system to keep track of packages
developed. When that's in place, the package can be designated to another
member of the research group and the information on CRAN can easily be
updated. I don't think CRAN would object to that :-) It just requires the
research group to stay aware of previous work. And that can sometimes be a
challenge in itself...

Cheers
Joris

On Tue, Jun 25, 2019 at 11:55 PM John Muschelli <muschellij2 at gmail.com>
wrote: